Worth a look – the functionality and usability of consumer sites is outpacing that of many corporate sites, according to Peter Yared, former CTO of Sun. Everything online is becoming collaborative, live and "organic" – dependent on others. That’s tough to create with outdated content systems and web strategies. Check out the last sentence of this excerpt (emphasis added):
The current crop of Web applications offers the ability to integrate data from multiple sources in new and useful ways, including user-contributed data. HousingMaps.com, for example, "mashes up" different data sources (including craigslist and Google Maps) and allows the apartment hunter to focus on desired neighborhoods, and easily peruse all the info they need regarding the available properties. MySpace.com allows users to post their own movies and blogs and all sorts of cool stuff about themselves.
The list goes on and on — Flickr, Friendster, BaseCamp. Sites that popped up overnight are pushing the envelope on how data is delivered, and on the quality of the user experience.
INSTANT INFO. Yet most Global 2000 Web sites (both consumer-facing and internal systems) still use technology that was developed in the late ’90s. Blue-chip companies with $200 million annual marketing budgets are being put to shame by Web upstarts with a fraction of the money. Consumer sites regularly integrate data from numerous systems, whereas in business, integrating multiple systems causes a lot of heartache, takes an eternity, and makes IT budgets skyrocket.
